IN THE AFTERMATH OF VIOLENCE: WHAT CONSTITUTES A RESPONSIVE RESPONSE?

As I began to finalize this introduction, reports were emerging of how a 21-year-old white man, called Dylann Storm Roof, had massacred nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Members of the congregation had attempted to dissuade him, but Roof had insisted that he had no choice, that he had ‘to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go’. In the immediate aftermath of what was widely reported as a ‘brutal’ and ‘senselsss’ ‘hate crime’, the governor of South Carolina, Nikki R. Haley, called for the death penalty, explaining that this was the ‘worst hate … the country has seen—in a long time’. Such reactions will no doubt recurr when Storm faces trial, but they must now also compete with the responses of the families of the deceased who, within days of the carnage, offered to forgive the accused despite the acute pain and distress they were evidently suffering (Stewart and Pérez-Peñajune 2015). Immediate offers of forgiveness are rare so soon after tragedy, but accounts of violence perpetrated in what are assumed to be relatively peaceful contexts are nevertheless a common feature of Western news coverage. This violence takes many forms. It includes the mass killings perpetrated by men like Anders Behring Breivik in Norway and Adam Lanza and the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the USA, hostage takings like the one perpetrated by Man Haron Monis in Sydney in December 2014, inner-city riots like those that gripped English cities in 2011 and American cities in 2014 and 2015, terrorist attacks, shootings perpetrated by law enforcement officers, abuses perpetrated within institutions—including the church, residential care homes, prisons or the BBC—as well as the lethal and near-lethal acts of interpersonal violence we think of as hate crimes, robberies and domestic assaults. Journalists are often quick to ask criminologists to explain why the perpetrators did what they did, while criminologists often prefer to say little publicly about crimes that defy the broadly humanizing thrust of most conventional socio-economic, psychological and political explanations. The recent upsurge in interest in public criminology notwithstanding (Loader and Sparks 2010), criminological comment on what motivated particular perpetrators is both rare and rarely well received in the public domain (Sereny 2000). This, as the contributors to this volume, all agree, needs to change if criminology is